Thursday Skull Blogging #2

For some people, Graham Greene's A Burnt-out Case is primarily a novel about an architect. For others it's about an atheistic doctor with a mordant sense of humour. I focussed on other aspects:

"There is an old Danish doctor still going the rounds who became a leprologist late in life. By accident. He was excavating an ancient cemetery and found skeletons there without fingerbones -- it was an old leper-cemetery of the fourteenth century. He X-rayed the skeletons and he made discoveries in the bones, especially in the nasal area, which were quite unknown to any of us -- you see most of us haven't the chance to work with skeletons. He became a leprologist after that. You will meet him at any international conference on leprosy carrying his skull with him in an airline's overnight bag. It has passed through a lot of douaniers' hands. It must be rather a shock, that skull, to them, but I believe they don't charge duty on it." (p. 113)

The Danish expert was of course Vilhelm Møller-Christensen, and the story is more-or-less true, though a lot of the time he was passing through customs with a whole string-bag of skulls, not just one. He later became friends with Greene and they sent one another signed copies of their books.*

My next blockbuster-novel-in-the-tradition-of-Dan-Brown will revolve around Møller-Christensen's collection of leprotic skulls. It will also feature the Knights of Saint Lazarus (not as well-known as the Knights-Templar, but far more interesting), who are locked in a conspiratorial battle with the collection's present-day custodians in order to re-capture the skull of Robert the Bruce (purloined and smuggled out of Scotland by Møller-Christensen to become the jewel in his collection, under shady circumstances involving bribery and a hollow bowling-ball). In the climactic scene they force entry to the underground sanctuary where the skulls are kept, but make away with the skull of Egil Skallagrimsson** by mistake, on account of believing the elaborate glass case containing it to be a sign of its royal significance. Then they all contract Paget's Syndrome from handling it, and die. The end.

* E.g. the Encyclopedia of Bible Creatures.
** Acquired for the collection on account of its unusual shape and described in Møller-Christensen's unfinished magnum opus, "Studies for a New Phrenology".